In a humid area, such as an island, the humidity is always high all year round. Dehumidification is an important factor for general living and industry. The operation of dehumidification is to remove moisture from air, making dry air that is suitable for human body health as well as industry activity.
The most commonly known ways for dehumidification include cooling, compression, chemicals, such as solid type adsorption agent and liquid type absorption agent, and honeycomb type moisture adsorption. The conventional dehumidification facility is expensive in both installation and maintenance, which make them impractical for general uses.
On the other hand, besides humidity and temperature control, the developed modem society also emphasizes on noise control and quality of surrounding air. However, for sound insulation and aesthetic purposes, interior decoration of buildings is often done with substance that may generate toxicant material due to aging. Such toxicant may cause damage to human health, especially in a closed space inside the building.
Thus, to ensure quality of air and for ventilation purposes, it is common to guide external, fresh air into the building and to expel or discharge interior air from the building. However, the external surrounding air is often in a condition of high humidity and high temperature, which becomes a large load to the air conditioning system of the building. Total heat exchange is often employed in buildings with air conditioning system to exchange humid heat and latent heat between the expelled air and the intake fresh air for energy recovery. This reduces energy consumption of the air conditioning system and constantly keeps air fresh inside the building.
FIG. 8 of the attached drawings shows a conventional total heat exchange system, which comprises a casing A defining an interior that is divided into two sections and a honeycomb rotor B rotatably mounted inside the casing A. Partitions are required between the sections of the casing A and the honeycomb rotor B to eliminate leakage of and mixture between intake air and exhaust air. Due to wearing caused by rotation of the honeycomb rotor B on the partitions between the honeycomb rotor B and the sections of the casing A, leakage or contamination will eventually occur.
Thus, the present invention is aimed to provide a dehumidification and energy recovery device that is low is cost and simple in construction to overcome the deficiency of the conventional devices.